That strategy is now starting to pay off, company executives said in a press release. Dell's server and networking-products revenue was up 11 percent for the quarter, as were sales of Dell-developed storage technology.

But Dell's push into homegrown storage has cost the company revenue, as its close relationship with storage vendor EMC has unravelled over the past few years. Largely due to a decline in sales of EMC-built storage servers, Dell's overall storage revenue was down 13 percent.

The company expects to refresh its consumer portfolio over the next few months with a focus on the high end of the portfolio, Gladden said.

On the enterprise side, IT expenditures are growing again after a few years of frozen spending, and that will contribute to above-average revenue growth for the second quarter, Dell said.

There's one area where Dell isn't looking for a lot of growth in the enterprise, at least not right away: tablet computing. For enterprises, tablets represent a third device -- after PCs and mobile phones -- that they simply don't want to manage, said company CEO Michael Dell. "It's not exactly clear how many units are going to be sold," Dell said on a conference call. "Gartner says there will be 2 billion PCs in 2014. I think there have been 10 or so million tablets sold in the last six months."